Dean Wampler is a software engineer at DRW Trading in Chicago. Dean co-wrote "Programming Scala" (O'Reilly, 2009) and he is a guest editor for the forthcoming IEEE Software special issue on "Multiparadigm Programming". Besides expertise in Scala, Dean has contributed to open source projects in Ruby and Java. Dean spends a lot of time thinking about the effective use of functional and object-oriented programming. He sometimes lurks around Erlang programmers. When not programming, Dean can be found on mountain trails, wherever he can find them.

Scala is a statically-typed, hybrid functional and object-oriented language for the JVM. The Scala standard library includes an Erlang- inspired Actors library. In this talk, I'll discuss how Scala compares and contrasts to Erlang, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each language for particular needs. For example, we'll discuss the pros and cons of a rich type system and static typing in Scala. We'll discuss ways that Scala is perhaps more general purpose than Erlang, but not as powerful in the areas where Erlang excels.